I’ve been thinking about saviors. How much I want one sometimes. How rare they seem! Even though all my Buddhist and yogic teachings about cause and effect don’t really make space for them, somehow there’s still space in my heart for the possibility of being saved. I can imagine salvation, sure, in the impersonal way that openness arises when the […]
Many years ago, some weeks into a two-month meditation retreat, I landed in something anyone who has stayed with a practice over time knows is inevitable: I was having a Very Hard Time. I was wilting in the face of an overwhelming doubt and sense of failure. Eventually, I sat in an interview with my teacher Jack and admitted that
Failure, Quan Yin, chant Read More »
There is a Zen riddle that replies to its own question. ‘Does a dog have the Buddha nature?’ the riddle asks. ‘Answer either way and you lose your own Buddha nature.’ Faced with a mystery about divinity, according to the riddle, we must always hover, uncertain, between the two possible answers. Never, on pain of losing our own divinity, are
“You are the music while the music lasts”: Improvisation, practice, silence, research Read More »
May the forces of delusion
not take hold, nor
weaken my resolve.
(Sharing of Merit)